Music

Mar 23, 2016, 09:28AM

Watercolors, Misted

The middle section of some dreams, long faded—“any movement beyond this in art,” specifically—is the point where I truly tune in, where the ambience resembles an unfocused, revolving honeycomb. A chorus of androids floats in deep synthesizer puddles, sounding both as one and as individuals, all voices distinct at aspects of a surrounding void. (For whatever reason, I keep flashing on the old woodcut inside art for C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, that eternal clearing of small, seemingly innocent pools, each potentially leading to various whens and wheres.) The technologically sterile and the classically baroque reach endlessly for each other from opposing ends of a cathedral dome.

Yeah, go ahead, ask Siri what waits for us along the far horizon. Her answer, murmured and indistinct, might sound something like this: Hans Zimmer’s pious choir-borne compositional awe denuded into a 2203 A.D.-era transhumanity that might as well arrive the day after tomorrow. Listen intensely enough for long enough, and you won’t even register the voices any longer; “any movement” becomes pure liquid surface submitting to an infinite number of gently lobbed pebbles. Listen even longer for it to melt into a swiftly diminishing, low frequency absence you can barely hear.